With the epochal shift in 1989/91, the historiography of Nazism and the Holocaust changed fundamentally. The 1991 study Vordenker der Vernichtung (Architects of Annihilation, 2002) was published at precisely this moment of political, epistemological and socio-theoretical change. Götz Aly and Susanne Heim investigated the significance of academic elites and their planning for the murderous policies of the Nazi state. Their work triggered fierce public and professional controversy as they established a connection between capitalist modernization in East Central Europe and the murder of European Jews.
This dissertation project takes a deep look at Vordenker der Vernichtung in order to trace significant changes in Nazi and Holocaust research. The history of the book goes back to the early 1980s, when critical emphasis within the West German health movement initially led to historical interest in Nazi health and social policy. Aly and Heim were part of a collective of researchers and authors that included people from outside of academia such as the physician Karl Heinz Roth and the psychotherapist Angelika Ebbinghaus. They worked beyond universities and tracked down new sources, for example in the archives of the People’s Republic of Poland and the GDR. The book series Beiträge zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik followed the logic of an activist counter-public: the periodical, founded in 1984, served as a place for academic profiling and preceded the historical non-fiction book as well as other journalistic works. At the same time, the book market for accounts of the Nazi era changed, as will be shown through the example of the “Schwarze Reihe” published by S. Fischer.
Vordenker der Vernichtung is revealing for historiographical analysis and the history of the humanities due to the discussions on the choice of methods and perspectives, the relationship between empiricism and (fascism) theory and, last but not least, the significance of the Holocaust in the history of modernity. Writing the history of Vordenker der Vernichtung means historicizing debates in Nazi and Holocaust research and embedding them in the epistemological and social changes of the period. Aspects of cultural studies of science also come into view. Aesthetic criteria must be examined in the area between specialist scholarship and the political public sphere, along with working practices in the humanities – in the documentary treatment of sources and in the approaches of biographical research as well as with regard to journalistic modes of presentation or the politicization of historical knowledge.